Still in the book of Acts, as written by Luke, a number of
tangents followed from the reading. One concerns the human hunger for the
tangible and quantifiable. Our memories normally are tied to a location, a
person, an event, or a thing. This attachment makes us conflate the meaning or
significance with the physical fabric of some thing or some person. And yet, it
is our hearts that God calls out to. It is our hearts that learn to respond to
God’s nudges or prodding. It is not ritual objects, sets of rules, special
words, or sacred elements that inherently confer righteousness. Instead it is
what communicates to our hearts (by means of those materials and those moments).
Even knowing this false equation of the physical traces to the Godly meanings,
we still fall easily into that misapprehension and pour our energies into
polishing the shiny objects, or uttering the special words reverently.
Another thread of tangent spun off from the confrontation of
the Apostles with the Sanhedrin (Jewish authorities) who forbid the men from
continuing to speak praises of (the crucified) Jesus. We talked about the
hereditary line of Sadducees and the more recent line (and political movement)
of Pharisees, and how both of them struggled to go on when the Temple later was
destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Roman occupation forces when a few Jewish uprisings,
the Zealots, and the dagger men (sacari) led to retribution. Where, then, did
Paul (Saul) fit into the timeline? In order to picture the overlapping lives of
Jesus, his Gospel writers, the disciples fanning out across the trade routes of
the Mediterranean, and among these Paul, one can think of the Paul as a
teenager, just coming into his studies with the master of Jewish law, Gamaliel,
around the time of the public ministry of Jesus near the end of his earthly life.
Then for a certain number of years Paul persecuted the emergent movement of
Jesus followers in their contradiction to the Laws of Moses, despite the
declared position of Jesus “not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” Paul’s
execution in Rome is estimated around A.D. 65 – 67. And so his awakening to the
message of the Gospel could have been around A.D. 42, say, and his subsequent
travels and epistles would then run more than 20 years.
It is marvelous to read the chapters of the Bible again, in
the company of other curious minds, and to turn up ever more and different
angles, connections to one’s own lived experience, or the questions that happen
to be on one’s heart at the time we get together on a Tuesday morning around a
pot or two of coffee.
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